Peter Smith

Nationally, Catholic voters have been closely divided in recent presidential elections. This year, in the vital state of Pennsylvania, they’ll likely comprise at least a quarter of the electorate — and thus play a pivotal role in deciding the overall outcome.

Here are some takeaways from the AP's reporting on Vance's Catholicism and the Catholic thinkers in his circle of influence.

The professors and media personalities in this network don’t all agree on everything — even on what to call themselves —  but most go by “postliberal.” They share some longstanding Catholic conservative views, such as opposition to abortion and LGBTQ+ rights. But where Catholic conservatives of the past have seen big government as a problem rather than a solution, the postliberals want a muscular government — one that they control.

It’s just a snapshot of a wider project. Catholic pilgrims are in the middle of a two-month journey on four routes across the United States. They're planning to converge on Indianapolis in mid-July for a climactic stadium gathering called the National Eucharistic Congress, the first such event in more than 80 years.

The city of Baltimore has agreed to pay $275,000 toward the legal fees of a far-right Catholic media group to settle a lawsuit over the city's unsuccessful attempt to block a rally in 2021.

When the Alabama Supreme Court ruled that frozen embryos are considered children under state law, Chief Justice Tom Parker cited verses from the Bible and Christian theologians in his concurring opinion. 

The founder of the far-right, unofficial Catholic media group Church Militant has resigned for an unspecified violation of the organization's morality clause, the group said in a statement Nov. 21.

Ukraine's parliament voted overwhelmingly Oct. 19 to advance legislation seen as effectively banning the Ukrainian Orthodox Church over its ties to Moscow, despite the church's insistence that it is fully independent and supportive of Ukraine's fight against Russian invaders.

Thirty percent of Americans don't identify with a religious group — but not all of them are atheists or agnostics. In fact, 43% of the group known as the "nones" say they believe in God, according to a new poll.

The decadeslong rise of the nones — a diverse, hard-to-summarize group — is one of the most talked about phenomena in U.S. religion. They are reshaping America's religious landscape as we know it.

After its searches of holy sites belonging to Ukraine's historic Orthodox church, the nation's security agency posted photos of evidence it recovered — including rubles, Russian passports and leaflets with messages from the Moscow patriarch.

In Dobbs, five justices voted to overturn Roe — Samuel Alito, Amy Coney Barrett, Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Clarence Thomas. A sixth, Chief Justice John Roberts, balked at overturning Roe but voted to uphold the Mississippi abortion restrictions in question. All six were raised Catholic.

The Southern Baptist Convention voted overwhelmingly June 14 to create a way to track pastors and other church workers credibly accused of sex abuse and launch a new task force to oversee further reforms in the nation's largest Protestant denomination.

Russian Orthodox Patriarch Kirill, leader of Russia's dominant religious group, has sent his strongest signal yet justifying his country's invasion of Ukraine — describing the conflict as part of a struggle against sin and pressure from liberal foreigners to hold "gay parades" as the price of admission to their ranks.

Among the sites at risk in the Ukrainian capital are the nation's most sacred Orthodox shrines, dating back nearly 1,000 years to the dawn of Christianity in the region.

A Truth and Healing process at Red Cloud Indian School in Pine Ridge, South Dakota, seeks to address the past of the former Catholic school once bent on assimilating Indigenous children into the dominant white, English-speaking, Christian culture.

The spiritual leader of the world's Eastern Orthodox Christians gave his formal blessing Tuesday to an ornate shrine that will replace a small parish church destroyed during the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks in New York City.

The discoveries of hundreds of unmarked graves at former residential schools for Indigenous children in Canada have prompted renewed calls for a reckoning over the traumatic legacy of similar schools in the United States — and in particular by the churches that operated many of them.

Justice Samuel Alito called it a "wisp" of a decision — a Supreme Court ruling June 17 that favored Catholic Social Services in Philadelphia but was far from the constitutional gale wind that would have reshaped how courts interpret religious liberty under the First Amendment.